Blerd Chick Stories: Revisiting Old Friends

I’m sick. Not just “oh I have the sniffles,” sick. I have a stye, so I’m all heating pad on the face, curled up in the comfy chair, “whaaaaa! I WANT MY MOMMY!” full on miserable. I am weird about my face/eyes and thus my usual stoicism has been replaced by a version of me that is a big baby. I am comfortable with this aspect of myself.

Because I am miserable and grumpy (as a result of said misery) I find it best to retreat into geekdom and watch movies and TV shows that I already know I’ll love. It is helpful that I’ve seen all of these enough times that I don’t actually have to look at them. My left eye is functionally swollen shut. Look at the world through just the right one leads to epic headaches.

Heathers:

The movie of my pompous teenaged self. I totally, like, was Veronica you guys. Except I wasn’t rich, or white, and I wasn’t friends with the mean girls. And I never had a boyfriend in high school Oh, and I didn’t kill anyone and make it look like a suicide.

Still, I appropriated her speech patterns, her sense of bored resentment and her dress sense. Well, I did that last one as much as possible growing up in Pennsylvania with no money and no stylist. So yes, I was tragic and amusing much of the time. No, you can’t have pictures.

Life Changing Moments Include: The first time I looked at the Bad Boy Trope and shook my head at the stupidity of the girl falling for him. Possibly the first moment I noticed how lighting can make a scene. If you are a lover of the movie you know exactly the one I’m talking about.

Night of the Comet:

Shut up. You know you love it too and if you don’t you’re wrong! This movie is so awful it is a freaking delight! The 80s hair, y’all. That hair! The totally irrational plot line! The shallow characterizations that make me completely unconcerned as to whether the characters live or die! What’s not to love?

Life Changing Moment: The first time I went back over a movie simply to outline what the characters did wrong so I could be sure not to repeat them in the event of a zombie apocalypse. It took a while. There were a lot of things.

Highlander:

Someone please explain to me how it is that immortality conveys the ability to form a personal, sword sized pocket dimension in your coat. I don’t care. I still love this movie. Adrian Paul and his sensitive ponytail had nothing on Christopher Lambert! Sword fights? Good. “Historical” flashbacks? Good. Queen soundtrack? EPIC! And frankly if not one of those things had existed, watching Sean Connery’s accent play an Spaniard/Egyptian opposite Lambert’s French tinged Highlander would have made it all worth while.

Life Changing Moments: QUEEN! Probably the first time in a movie that I realized that plots only movie forward if all cops are written as morons.

Death Race 2000:

No not the remake, although I love that too, the original! Seriously, at age 12 the lines “It’s a grenade,” followed by “Yes, a hand grenade,” was the funniest thing I’d ever heard in my life. I don’t care if it plays like a bad acid trip. I will always love it!

Life Changing Moment: Are you kidding me? Have you seen this movie?

Firefly: Oh Captain Reynolds and crew, how we miss thee! I think of this as the most perfect television show ever, mostly because they knew pretty early they weren’t getting a second season so they poured everything they had into it. It refined Whedon’s standard character group into the perfect mix of realistic and over-the-top with bonus black, female ass kicking first officer. I wish we’d been given more than one season. I’m sure then, I would have been able to find things to hate.

Life Changing Moment: Silence in space!

And then I settled down to watch I, Claudius because it’s free on Amazon Prime and I’ve watched it often enough that I don’t really have to listen to it either.

Yes, I know, one of these things kind of doesn’t belong. Don’t nerd limit me! There are very few genres wherein I can’t find a way to get my geek on.

A-‘s comfort movies are the Alien flicks. Yes, all of them. I don’t care if that’s the purist way of judging the series. I’m not that geek. She is. When she’s ill she curls up with her Space Marines and her stuffed alien facehugger and Queen (because I am a good girlfriend and know how to give a good gift) and watches bloody and carnage and Ripley.

Yeah. While I was sick over the holidays (I’m still trying to perusade the last of it to go away), I did a lot of comfort viewing. Only mine was Castle and NCIS, and oh. My. God. I found an episode of Here Come The Brides on one of the classic TV stations at about 1 in the morning one night when I needed it the most. Junior high school flashback, anyone? There was also quite a bit of Doctor Who watched, as well as some Firefly, I think. In the creeping-crud-induced haze, it’s really kind of difficult to remember clearly. I know I spent most of a week and a half flat on the couch in front of the TV because I felt too miserable to do anything else.

Yes, replying to myself. I did manage to post on my blog on all but one of the days that I was sick, but I have no idea if anything I wrote made any sense at all. I’m kind of afraid to go back and look.